Two

Nobody's Bizzness; 2009

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Though she was working prior to this, it's safe to say Miss Kittin's career truly began with 2000's "Frank Sinatra". As career highlights go, never mind first bows, it's a pretty enviable one-- over the Hacker's brilliantly stupid rinky-dink ur-techno backdrop, Caroline Hervé speak-sings self-absorbed bon mots like "To be famous is so nice/ Suck my dick/ Kiss my ass," over and over with a dispassionate cadence. Miss Kittin's aloof sex-on-ice charisma, paired with synthesized tunes that exploited that detachment ("Stripper" and "Life on MTV" proving you can judge a book by its cover), made First Album a trailblazer for that like-it-or-lump-it music movement known as electroclash. So now, nearly a decade later, in a year that sees electroclash standard-bearers Fischerspooner and Peaches also release new albums, Miss Kittin & the Hacker reconvene for their purported follow-up to that debut, conveniently titled Two.

Of course, there are some things to keep in mind when trying to paint this "reunion" as just that-- this isn't the first time Kittin & the Hacker have worked together since First Album (with the Hacker contributing beats to I Com and Batbox), and the Miss Kittin from the turn of the century isn't the same as the turn-of-the-decade version. Just look at some of the song titles from Two-- "The Womb", "Emotional Interlude", "Inutile Éternité" (French for "useless eternity"), "Suspicious Minds". And, yes, that's Elvis Presley's "Suspicious Minds" that the duo is tackling, and they're doing it in a straight-faced manner. Now given the ways and means of Kittin & the Hacker, "straight-faced" might not be the best description for this cover, but if it's possible to do a techno'd version of "Suspicious Minds" straight, then by gum they're doing it as well as they can. Which is to say, not very well at all, unless you're partial to Eurodisco karaoke. Accouterments aside, the distance between Sinatra and Presley-- as heartthrob icons, pop music iconoclasts, or Vegas showmen-- is probably minuscule. But the distance between the cultured self-aware cool of "Frank Sinatra" (or First Album as a whole) and the oblivious earnestness of "Suspicious Minds" could be measured in light years.

It's a distance that's only accentuated by this record's superficial attempt to hearken back to the duo's glory days. But folks that kept up with Kittin's post-First output already know about the conflict between what she does best (the cooler-than-you kiss-off) and what she seemingly wants to be. On Two, only "PPPO" sidesteps that tar pit, mostly because Kittin's vocal input is limited to shouting four words-- "people," "pleasure," "objects," and "power"-- every so often. That the tune also features the Hacker's best block-rocking beat of the album doesn't hurt. But the Hacker's workmanlike production here can't save Kittin from herself. When she's given room to speak her mind, as on "The Womb" ("I am strong, and I'm climbing the social ladder on my own") or "Party in My Head" ("I'm so small, I'm so not individual"), she sounds like she's trying to convince herself that she's one of the little people she once enjoyed stepping on. In tracks like "Ray Ban" and "Indulgence", she makes a vain attempts to reconnect to the glitz and gaudiness of First Album-era Kittin, and sounds even more out-of-step as a result. And only die-hard Kittin fans (or folks with a severe allergy to melisma and other diva signifiers) will find anything of substance to enjoy in "1000 Dreams" or "Electronic City". As the next step in Kittin's conflicted evolution, Two is not that much different from (or more enjoyable than) what's preceded it. As a supposed remembrance of the heyday of electroclash, it's a nostalgia trip that's best left untaken.